Mr Tudjman's reason for expelling Unprofor was its inability to reintegrate Serb-held areas of Croatia despite numerous Security Council resolutions

Mr Tudjman's reason for expelling Unprofor was its inability to reintegrate Serb-held areas of Croatia, despite numerous Security Council resolutions ."The worries are twofold. But they want an international presence and may have to accept border monitors as the price.President Tudjman may also find it difficult to sell the deal - a face- saving formula and a retreat from his demand that the UN should leave - to a domestic audience stirred to contempt for the UN by Croatia's media.UN officials fear they will be saddled with a mandate they cannot implement. "I consider this a major step away from war and towards peace." Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary, said: "This paves the way for an effective UN force to continue keeping the peace in Croatia. Such a force is vital to the stability of Croatia and the region."The US-Croat deal must still be approved by the Security Council and accepted by the Krajina Serb leaders in their Knin headquarters.

The Serbs have rejected the idea of a smaller UN force and are unlikely to welcome monitors on the frontier with their ethnic kin in Bosnia and Yugoslavia. By that time, five people had been killed in the city in the previous 24 hours.According to a statement issued by President Tudjman, the new mission would have three tasks; to control Croatia's borders with Bosnia and the rump Yugoslavia; to control the passage of aid to Bosnia through Serb- held territories in Croatia; to facilitate implementation of agreements with the rebel Serbs, notably a ceasefire and economic accord, and to encourage the reintegration of Croatia."This is very good news," Mr Gore said. FROM EMMA DALY in Zagreb Croatia yesterday agreed to allow a smaller United Nations peace-keeping force (Unprofor) to remain in the country, prompting sighs of relief from diplomats and UN officials who hope to avert a new Balkan war, at least this spring.Under the agreement, Croatia's President, Franjo Tudjman, who had ordered the 14,000 peace-keepers to leave Croatia when the UN mandate expires in three weeks' time, will allow 5,000 to stay. The deal struck with the US Vice-President, Al Gore, may only postpone an inevitable battle with the Croatian and Bosnian Serbs.Meanwhile, at Sarajevo airport, a bullet fired into a jet carrying the UN envoy to the former Yugoslavia,Yasushi Akashi, narrowly missed one of his bodyguards. Nelson Mandela was given a vastly warmer reception when he told the plenary session that "we in South Africa have learnt through bitter experience that security for a few is in fact insecurity for all".Just hot air? page 15. As more than one of the judges pointed out, this excluded Alan Bennett's Writing Home and Kenneth Tynan's Collected Letters, incontestably a pair of diamond earrings in the jewel box of British "non-fiction". Rather more sneaky was the exclusion of The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of Aids by the Independent journalist Simon Garfield.

It was argued by the chairman Alan Clark that the book was no more than a series of Garfield's disparate newspaper articles bolted together and thus not appropriate as a contender. When his co-judges protested (Garfield's book is a written-through analysis, based on original research), Clark changed tack. "Why do we need another book," he demanded, "on a disease which is basically self-inflicted?" True, Mr Clark did not try to disqualify the work - as was his chairmanly right - but by the time it narrowly failed to get through on a second ballot, it was unclear whether the "inappropriate" label had stuck.It is obvious that book prizes require rules, otherwise judges would find themselves considering recipe books and car manuals along with the biographies and social history. But perhaps a greater flexibility about the creative aspect of letters and journals would be "appropriate" - as would the choice of a chairman who did not let personal prejudices cloud his judgement.. Ben Okri's work self- consciously resists the traditional finality of fiction, aspiring instead to the timelessness and open-endedness of myth.

In five novels, he has evolved a complex style, in which conventional narrative is subverted, replaced by something more fragmentary and formless, proceeding through loose association and connection, so that its textures are the very rhythms of consciousness and memory. In this strange hallucinatory world of spirits, magic and miracles, dying becomes an impossibility and endings are repeatedly deferred. Everything that happens, Nietzsche wrote, eternally happens again and again, and one can hear echoes of his doctrine of eternal recurrence in Okri's fiction: in The Famished Road - his fine, Booker-winning novel - the spirit child Azaro endlessly lives and dies, always returning to the monumental realm of spirits where he is happiest. When he re-enters the phenomenal world, however, he encounters only atrocity, suffering and violence. There is a restlessness about Okri's lonely and homeless spirit children which is rather sad.

Confronted by a world they neither know nor understand, they yearn, like Plato's cave-dwellers, to transcend the darkness of mere appearances in order to bask in the light of ultimate reality, that which lies beyond daily sensory experience. In Astonishing the Gods, the unnamed hero-narrator is also immortal, but finds his immortality a burden. He wants to live a simple life as a shepherd, but being born invisible, he is condemned to spend his days unhappily searching for "the secret of invisibility". Encouraged by his mother, he leaves home and travels for seven years until he finds an enchanted island, which charms him with its promise. Accompanied by guides - many of whom are also invisible - he explores the island, undergoing a series of trials which test his resolve: he walks across a bridge of flames and is burned; he swims through the air only to be harassed by demons; a woman tempts him with her body and he rejects her.